For much of the past week, while our teachers and students have been enjoying a very well deserved break, I have been attending the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of International Education (AAIE) in San Francisco.
AAIE is one of several international education organizations to which Awty belongs, and my incentive for attending this conference was to learn more about best practices adopted by school boards of international schools. The session on this topic was conducted by Alan Conkey, a retired Head of School who recently surveyed 108 international schools about all facets of their board practices – size and organization, meeting structures, committees, by-laws, methods of appointing and removing members, and many other matters. His session did not disappoint; I even managed to obtain a copy of Alan’s presentation (which includes a multitude of useful statistics) that I will offer to share at a future meeting of the Working Group on Governance that has been
meeting at Awty for the past few months.
To be frank, I found several of the other major presentations at the conference a bit shallow compared with other conferences I have attended – but in all fairness, my expectations of educational conferences are rather high. Having said that, there was one presentation that I thought was truly excellent, this being a lecture by Dr James Stronge on the impact of teacher effectiveness on student success.
James Stronge is the Heritage Professor of Educational Policy, Planning and Leadership at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He has recently conducted research into the factors that have an impact on student success, and not surprisingly,
he found that the most significant factor (apart from students’ innate intelligence) is the quality of the input provided by the teacher.
Before coming to this conclusion, Stronge studied a range of factors that might affect student achievement in several key countries such as Canada, Finland, Singapore, China (Shanghai), South Korea and the US. The factors he examined included the number of days students spend each year in school, the number of minutes in a typical school day, the amount of money spent on each student and the teacher-student ratio. None of these factors was shown to have any significant impact on student success, and the only factor (from this list) that showed a modest influence was the 7% to 8% improvement in student outcomes that comes (albeit at a huge financial cost) when average class sizes are reduced from 25 to 16.
On the other hand, in a study undertaken by Stronge that looked at actual vs predicted achievement in students, an improvement in student outcomes of between 25% to 30% was shown to be possible when students had an effective teacher, potentially raising student outcomes from the 60th to the 90th
percentile of achievement. Stronge measured the individual impact of 15 separate indicators of teacher effectiveness – differentiation of teaching strategies, focus, clarity, complexity, expectations, use of technology, assessment, verbal feedback, management, organization, caring, fairness, responsibility, relationships and enthusiasm. He found that all of these factors can have a positive impact on student success, but with different degrees of impact. Technology was found to have the least impact of the 15 he studied. The two facets of teacher effectiveness that had the greatest impact on student outcomes were classroom management (which is a teachable skill) and the quality of relationships between the teacher and the students (which is an innate skill).
When the variables of student outcomes were analysed at the conclusion of his study, Stronge found that 50% of the differences in student achievement were explained by student differences (i.e. innate intelligence), while the other factors were teacher effectiveness (30%), home dynamics (5% to 10%), the Head of School (5% to 10%), and peers (5% to 10%).
Speaking to an audience that largely comprised Heads of Schools, Stronge emphasized that three of these
factors (teacher effectiveness, the Head of School and the impact of peers) are largely determined by the School Head, because teacher quality and the type of impact peers have on each other are functions of school culture, which derives from the type of leadership shown by the Head.
It was a salutary reminder of the pivotal role that Heads of School perform in forming young lives – as Strong commented “the quickest way to raise students’ performances is to get the right Head of School”. As the Head of a School that had just seen its ‘best ever’ results in both the IB Diploma and the French Bac, I found myself smiling and nodding in humble agreement :-)
It reminded me of a saying I had heard somewhere a few years ago (and unfortunately I can’t recall who said it, or when, or where): “We need to change the world, one child at a time”.
And of course, that is precisely what effective teachers do.